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Introduction

Criminal informants provide important information to the justice system, but they also pose serious risks. We hope this website will help attorneys, journalists, advocates, and families to better understand this vital area of public policy.

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WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS

Criminal informants are famously unreliable. Jailhouse snitch testimony often leads to wrongful conviction. Over 45 percent of all innocent people exonerated from death sentences were wrongfully convicted based on the testimony of a lying criminal informant. This makes snitches the leading cause of wrongful conviction in U.S. capital cases.

YOUNG INFORMANTS

Police sometimes use children as young as 14 as informants. These children may be exposed to drugs, violence, and other criminal activities as they work to get information for their handlers. Some have been killed. California and New Jersey have laws restricting the practice: in other states police have discretion to use juvenile informants.

INFORMANT CRIMES

Some informants are serious criminals who receive leniency for their own crimes. The FBI has been known to use murderers as informants. Many jurisdictions permit drug dealers to continue selling drugs in exchange for cooperation. In 2011, the crimes committed by FBI informants alone totaled over 5,600.

URBAN COMMUNITIES PAY THE PRICE

Informants are a staple of drug enforcement. This means that where drug enforcement is heaviest, informant activity is also heaviest. Because drug arrests occur disproportionately in low-income African American neighborhoods, those residents must live with the crime, violence, and distrust that go with criminal informant use.

REFORM

Many states are rethinking their criminal informant policies. Some have passed laws restricting the use of jailhouse snitch witnesses. Some have created new rules for disclosure and accountability. The U.S. Congress is considering a number of reforms that would improve transparency and safety. In the future, the laws governing criminal informants will likely look very different than they do today.

Recent Blog Posts

Saturday, December 15, 2012

USA Today ran this indepth story about a pay-for-information scheme in the Atlanta jail, in which federal inmates looking for cooperation credit bought information to pass on to their handlers, passing it off as their own knowledge. Story here: Federal prisoners use snitching for personal gain. The story offers an unusually detailed and extensive look at the ways that inmates and informants can game the system, buying and selling information that prosecutors and investigators then reward them for and rely on. In this black market free-for-all, inmates paid tens of thousands of dollars ($250,000 in one case) for information to lower their sentences, while FBI agents relied on snitches who were passing on second-hand uncorroborated information from the street. It is the fourth such scheme uncovered in Atlanta alone in the last 20 years.

A similar pay-for-information scheme was discovered in a federal prison in Louisiana, after Ann Colomb and her three sons were wrongfully convicted based on the testimony of dozens of snitch inmates. See this post: Professional Prison Snitch Ring.

Their convictions were based on the perjured testimony of criminal informant Matthew Dunham, a convicted robber who received a 17-month sentence in exchange for his testimony. Another co-defendant later admitted that he and Dunham had fabricated their testimony against Larson, Gassman and Statler.

This is an important case for a number of reasons. First, it is extraordinarily difficult to challenge convictions after the fact, even where new evidence demonstrates innocence. A judge had previously denied the defendants' motion for a new trial after it was discovered that Dunham had lied, so the fact that the parties persevered and a court ruled in their favor makes this case uncommon.

Second, the case highlights how the lack of financial support for public defense in this country leads to miscarriages of justice. The attorneys representing the Spokane defendants were paid the paltry sum of $1,400 per case for cases that required hundreds of hours of investigation and preparation. Low attorney fees for complex cases are pervasive in many states, and they mean that even skilled well-meaning attorneys do not have the resources to defend such cases properly. For an indepth report on the phenomenon, see this U.S. Department of Justice Report: Contracting for Indigent Defense Services: A Special Report (April 2000).

Finally, it took years of work on the part of the Innocence Project and the families to bring about this reversal. The Statler family's efforts were extraordinary: as a result of their persistence, a Washington state legislator introduced a bill that would reduce the risks of informant use and future wrongful convictions. Such efforts were necessary because the criminal system does not have good internal mechanisms to protect defendants from lying informants--wrongful convictions are difficult to unearth and even harder to fix. As happens all too often, the legal system finally came to the right result in this case only because the families refused to give up.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The New York Times ran this story about the infamous case of Stephanie George: For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars. Ms. George became a poster child in 1997 for the unfairness of federal mandatory minimum sentencing when she received a lifetime sentence for a half kilo of cocaine that her former boyfriend had hidden in her attic.

Ms. George also became a prime example of how informing, or in federal parlance, providing "substantial assistance" to the government, can turn the justice system upside down. Ms. George's boyfriend--a cocaine dealer and ringleader--and other members of the drug ring received lower sentences than she did because they became informants. Because Ms. George had no information, she couldn't snitch and therefore U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson had no discretion to lower her sentence, a sentence that the judge himself considered draconian and unfair. From the story:

"Stephanie George was not a major participant by any means, but the problem in these cases is that the people who can offer the most help to the government are the most culpable," Judge Vinson said recently. "So they get reduced sentences while the small fry, the little workers who don't have that information, get the mandatory sentences."

Judge Vinson's comment reflects an intentional design feature of federal drug law. Because becoming an informant is the only way a defendant can avoid harsh mandatory minimums, snitching has become pervasive in the federal criminal system.